Collection Development

I missed my library visit for February due to pulling a muscle. I was very sad. Thankfully I have another Library visit coming up to the Royal College of Physicians Library Archive and Museum in April. I'm very excited to go to this one due to the archives dating back hundreds of years and the old Physicians tools out on display. I find that kind of thing hugely fascinating.

I also did a new thing this month. I worked on collection development and deleting missing titles from the collection on our LMS. I will eventually be helping to weed out outdated books from our collection so getting to know what constitutes as outdated or unwanted, is now something on my list to learn.

I found deleting titles from Sirsi fairly easy. Most of the missing titles are placed in a "missing" category on the system so you can look them up as a user, which is a bit strange. Many of them still had bills attached to them so I had to "pay" them so to speak before I could delete the item. You also have to discharge them, usually, before they can be deleted.It's funny, I know there is still a lot I don't know how to do on the LMS, but recently I tried writing down all the steps to things I do know how to do. There was so much! It's hard to believe that A) I have learned so much and, B) that the system is so complicated.

Finding new books to replace for some of those I deleted was challenging, but quite a bit of fun. I've done this some before with children's books, but medical texts are much different, obviously. I don't know what many of the texts are really about so finding a book that covers the same material, but in an updated and better format is no easy task. However, difficult as it may be, I am happy to report that I did a good job with the handful of texts I tried to find replacements for. I also found the exercise to be a lot of fun and am anxious to learn more about the subject.